Linux Mint 13 "Maya" has reached end of life at the end of April 2017. This release was based on Ubuntu 12.04 and was our first release with Cinnamon!

Your programs will continue to work but no more updates or security fixes will be made available for them. Users of Linux Mint 13 are therefor recommended to migrate to Linux Mint 18.1 (which will be supported until April 2021) or Linux Mint 17.3 (supported until April 2019) soon. For all available supported releases and an overview of support periods see https://linuxmint.com/download_all.php.

Upgrade instructions: To upgrade to a newer release of Linux Mint, backup your important personal files and do a fresh installation. You can not upgrade in place (without reinstalling) as you can do with newer releases of Linux Mint. You may refer to the How to upgrade to a newer release tutorial or ask for support from others on the Installation & Boot forum. If you have a dual boot installation (Linux Mint alongside another operating system) I recommend you ask for support on the forum if you are unsure of the steps.

If you have an older computer that can only run 32-bit software and it doesn't officially support PAE—like a computer with an Intel Pentium M processor—the chance is good you can use Linux Mint 17.x and 18.x anyway (Linux Mint 13 didn't require a processor capable of PAE; Linux Mint 17 and newer do). Instructions for this from the release notes: "To boot Linux Mint on CPU which do not officially support PAE please use the 'Start Linux Mint with PAE forced' option from the boot menu." If it doesn't work on your computer you can instead use LMDE 2 as that works with any 32-bit processor regardless of whether it is PAE capable.

Linux Mint 17.x and 18.x do require more free disk space for the installation (9 GB instead of 5 GB for Linux Mint 13) but otherwise the system requirements are comparable. The MATE edition and certainly the Xfce edition would be an option for older computers.

If you're concerned MATE or Xfce would still be too heavy for your computer you can also switch to LXDE. Just install the packages lxde and lxde-common. I recommend you do that with the following command to also get the additionally recommended LXDE packages installed:apt install --install-recommends lxde lxde-commonThen logout and on the login screen select to login to a LXDE session (use the gearwheel icon in the top right of the login box).

For assistance or help with migrating to a newer release of Linux Mint please make a new topic in the support section of the forum.

I have a very old Athlon 64x2 (2GB ram) with LM13 Xfce, and I would prefer not to upgrade. LM13 performance in that machine is excellent. Some key programs can be updated anyway, like Firefox and LibreOffice. I can't see a really impelling or mandatory necessity to "upgrade" the system.

It will be unsafe to continue to use Ubuntu 12.04 / Linux Mint 13 for anything on the Internet, and irresponsible to suggest to anybody else that it is "fine". Newly discovered security bugs can and do also affect older software versions and as such, with Ubuntu 12.04 / Linux Mint 13 not receiving any upgrades to their software after April, these operating systems will be at increasing risk as time goes by.

If you look back over the past few years to the critical vulnerabilities caused by security bugs like Beast, Heartbleed, Freak, Poodle, and Shellshock you know this is not an exaggeration. In time, new critical vulnerabilities will be come to light that also affect older software version and those will not be solved on Ubuntu 12.04 / Linux Mint 13.

If you find that LM 17.3 or newer doesn't work well for you, LM 17.2 may be the good choice. It's supported the same as LM17.3 and comes without all the transitional systemd and hardware issues you may experience with 17.3 and beyond. I'm not kicking anything new. I am just saying some people with older hardware may be better off with 17.2.

xfrank wrote:I have a very old Athlon 64x2 (2GB ram) with LM13 Xfce, and I would prefer not to upgrade. LM13 performance in that machine is excellent. Some key programs can be updated anyway, like Firefox and LibreOffice. I can't see a really impelling or mandatory necessity to "upgrade" the system.

Unfortunately xenopeek got reason.It is a risky business to keep Mint 13 ( or not more updated OSes ) without updates against eventual new threats as security bugs/backdoors and the likes.The web is plenty from every kind of malware..

Just in case if it helps anyone, I will share my experience. I must say I have succesfully installed linux mint 18 xfce 32 bit on a very old (2002 or so) Pentium IV. Of course I had to solve some trouble because the machine was specially outfitted with internal speakers:viewtopic.php?f=48&t=232557&p=1288033Besides of that, it's now working fine, of course I don't know how hard I can push it since my parents use it only to watch some videos online.

I was extremely happy with Mint 13 Mate. (Almost) everything worked pretty much out of the box on my dated hardware. Alas my move to Mint 17.3 Mate didn't meet the expectations gained from Mint 13. I had more hiccups, instabilities and odd behaviours with 17.3 on my notebook than with Mint 13. So, some days ago, after my disk with 17.3 had a hardware crash, I installed LMDE2 instead of the Mint Ubuntu branch. Even though Debian is a different beast and many things are a bit harder and laborious to achieve, I am getting the impression that LMDE2 runs much more stable and supports my dated hardware much better than the Ubuntu branch past Mint 13.

Nevertheless, there are a few programs to spoil the good impression, e.g. the GTK version of gThumb Viewer in the Jessie repositories is plain useless compared to the version available in the Precise or Trusty repositories, glmark2 I will have to compile from source since it's not in the Jessie repositories and a few other minor annoyances which aren't too bothersome. I will stick with LMDE2 unless something really mayor should come up.

I was extremely happy with Mint 13 Mate. (Almost) everything worked pretty much out of the box on my dated hardware. Alas my move to Mint 17.3 Mate didn't meet the expectations gained from Mint 13. I had more hiccups, instabilities and odd behaviors with 17.3 on my notebook than with Mint 13.

My experience here is that LM 17.2 runs noticeably better than LM 17.3 on the laptops and the older machines we have. Anytime we have difficulty installing something newer on a box we always give LM 17.2 a try before investigating something else. LM 17.2 is supported just as long as 17.3 is and it isn't locked in to systemd and several other things that may be causing you installation/operational grief on older hardware. We run MATE on all our boxes/desktops here except a couple of test machines with Cinn.

Also, we prefer to use LM 18.1 on machines that can run LM 17.3 okay. It's more refined and just better.

Trapper wrote:My experience here is that LM 17.2 runs noticeably better than LM 17.3 on the laptops and the older machines we have. [...]

Thanks, good to know. Nevertheless, I've just spend quite some time getting Playonlinux and 32-Bit Windows programs to work on 64-Bit LMDE2. Oddly enough, I'm starting to like the Debian way. For some reason and without my doings even my network shares are better supported with LMDE2 than they were with Mint 13 ( some minor hiccups with latency and Winamp play-lists wouldn't play in Audacious).

Trapper wrote:We run MATE on all our boxes/desktops here except a couple of test machines with Cinn.

Since I prefer working with windowed programs, sometimes quite a few in parallel and constantly switching between them, I don't need a DE eating up my precious system resources for fancy appearances. Therefore, Mate is the best choice for me and it pretty much resembles the look (partly) and feel which I have grown accustomed to since Dos and Windows 3.1.

DanielR wrote:, Mate is the best choice for me and it pretty much resembles the look (partly) and feel which I have grown accustomed to since Dos and Windows 3.1.

Same here. I even still have an old IBM PS2 with SCSI drives that runs DOS and Windows 3.11. I just keep it around for posterity. It just sits there. Every few years I fire it up. Still connects to the internet. Can't do anything with it because everything is completely outdated and insecure .... but it still works. It was my original learning box. It deserves to remain.